Carnegie Mellon Researchers Studying Twitter Turn to UrbanDictionary

Not surprisingly, Northern Californians write that they are “hella tired” rather than the more Southern Californian “tired af” (as fuck). Tweets in New York City turned up with “something” written as “suttin,” and the word “koo” for “cool” is found in North Carolina (and the Philippines!).

While research in perceptual dialectology does conﬁrm the link of hella to Northern California (Bucholtz et al., 2007), we caution that our ﬁndings are merely suggestive, and a more rigorous analysis must be undertaken before making deﬁnitive statements about the regional membership of individual terms.

Carnegie Mellon’s researchers were able to pull some Twitterisms and translate them using UrbanDictionary.com. Here are some:

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